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Thursday, 15 June 2017

Labour's candidates at the next election must be selected democratically

Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour leadership have stated that the party will be on "a permanent election footing" as they wait for the collapse of Theresa May's government, but if this is the case they need to immediately set up the process of selecting prospective parliamentary candidates in a democratic manner so that there is no repeat of the undemocratic selection processes that happened during Theresa May's vanity election.One of the main reasons that people have flooded back to the Labour Party is that the democratic reforms instituted by Ed Miliband meant that the Labour membership could vote for a leader to give them the kinds of policies they actually want, rather than the unappealing neoliberalism-lite slop the Parliamentary Labour Party had been fixated with since the mid-1990s.If Labour doesn't give local people the opportunity to select their own candidates, and simply foists whichever candidate they see fit onto local people, that would be a betrayal of the democratic spirit that has driven Labour's resurgence.If Labour is on a "permanent election footing", then there is absolutely no excuse for not ensuring that all local Labour constituency groups are geared up for an immediate democratic selection process once the next General Election is called.A repeat of the undemocratic selection processes from Theresa May's vanity election would be an extreme betrayal of the party membership because local Labour Party members have the right to pick their own candidates, not have them imposed by the party hierarchy.

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